From Wide Angle 4, no.1 (1980): 66–75. Reprinted by permission of Russell Merritt and Peter Lehman.
Samuel Fuller, Hollywood director, was the guest of the 1980 Athens [Ohio] International Film Festival. He proved ideal for a festival dedicated to showcasing fiercely independent filmmakers. During an audience question-and-answer session, he explained that his films depart from classical narrative construction. Rather than situations developed leading up to climaxes, they are a series of shocks and explosions. Fuller himself is a never-ending series of explosions. Vigorous, enthusiastic, exciting, he delighted everyone he spoke to during his visit.
RM: The most common word applied to your films is “primitive.” Do you like that?
SF: It doesn’t bother me at all. In a way, it intrigues me. It gives me a picture of a hairy ape and a grabber of women’s hair.
PL: What makes people call your work “primitive”?
SF: I don’t know. It could be a very good compliment. If you say, “He was a wonderful primitive writer, or poet, or killer from Alaska,” your mind runs from breast beaters to grizzly bears to Eskimos, according to the country.
PL: In cinema, most filmmakers look like they’re working in the shadow of D. W. Griffith.
SF: That I like. That makes sense.
PL: But isn’t your work unlike most work made after Griffith?
SF: I never looked at it that way. My original inspiration was John Ford’s The Informer. For only one reason. Emotion! That film will give you every emotion you want.
PL: The Informer? You’ve talked about The Ox-Bow Incident in the same way. I found that puzzling, too. Both films are slow moving, the images classically composed. They’re such pretentious movies, entirely unlike you.
SF: The treatment of the story, the telling of the story?
RM: Much different. Your work is a series of shocks.
PL: I greatly admire John Ford, but he works in Griffith’s shadow.
SF: You’re 100 percent right. He sets his camera. He does not make a moving picture. I’m excited about the camera being not just the eye, that’s normal, but the actual mouth. It’s the audience, it’s going through a keyhole, getting under a bush.
RM: Judging from your films, you still believe in America as the best hope for refugees, orphans, the homeless. Yet the America you portray is a divided, racially disturbed, underworld with pimps, whores, delinquents, scum. Why would anyone want to be part of a country like that?
SF: Because a country like that, no matter how disturbed, confused, or low, is a ship with a deck. It has been proven far more inviting than other decks all over the world. Now America might have twelve Captain Blighs, and they might flog the hell out of you even before breakfast, and blood runs down the goddamn deck, and the real skipper of the ship is hypocrisy. But it’s not sinking.
RM: America is the best we can expect?
SF: No, America is about the worst we can expect. [Even if it’s] the best of all existing nations. Very terrible. But it’s young. It’s a baby, don’t forget. It’s wet and we are wiping its ass. I don’t know why everyone like you says, “You show the pimps and whores.” We have that in the United States—pimps, procurers, Nixon. There’s nothing wrong in that, my God.
RM: But there is something wrong in that.
SF: It’s wrong when they’re caught. Aha!
RM: It’s wrong when they do it.
SF: This has been going on for ten thousand years.
RM: That doesn’t make it wrong?
SF: Being wrong is the right way of living. We have been brought up like that since 10,000 BC. It started with a man and a club. The club developed into a sword. That’s the birth of royalty. That’s the birth of power. Take a look at any goddamn nation. How do you think it survives?
PL: I’m struck by the specifically American dedications that you gave to several of your films—the American press, the American military. The Army.
SF: No. No. Not the Army. Oooh, I’m very touchy about that. I dedicated [a film] to the US Infantry. Now the Infantry is a very special thing to me because they are actually said to be expendable. I could have said, “Dedicated to 7,800 number 745s,” but to the audience that wouldn’t mean anything. In an Army death list, a 745 is a rifleman. When you die, it’s a rifleman; it’s not you; it’s not a name. I see lists, lists, lists, of how many 745s have died. We have progressed to a point where when men die, they have become numbers. See, a rifleman is the lowest form in the Army. That’s a very personal thing to me.
RM: Is that what your script for The Rifle is about?
SF: The Rifle is about Vietnam. If I have enough money, then I’ll show you a Vietnam story, for Christ’s sake. These other Vietnamese stories are shit! In my story, it’s the American point of view, and the Americans are right. CUT. We go to the VC point of view, they’re right. CUT. Chinese point of view. CUT. Russian point of view. Every point of view. We put them all together at the end. They’re not only full of shit, they’re the biggest hypocrites in the world.
PL: That would be different from The Steel Helmet or China Gate, where only the American point of view, or the Western point of view, is expressed.
SF: That’s your story! I didn’t want to go into “guilty” for China Gate. I was interested in a half-dozen men from different countries. Everyone is using [Indo-China] as a battlefield.
RM: But that’s not your perspective in this film. It’s not that Indo-China is being raped by assorted countries. In your prologue, you make it very clear that your sympathies are with the French cause. China Gate is a paean to the French forces liberating Indo-China from the Communists.
SF: I don’t think I headed that way. I bring out a French viewpoint?
PL: It’s the voice-over which gives authority to that perspective.
SF: What does the narrator say?
PL: That Russia is causing the turmoil, and that the French are the last to stand up to them.
SF: OK, I got it. You are saying that the finale of the narration brings it down to only one viewpoint. That one country, Russia, is coming in and another country, France, has to kick this country out.
RM: That’s right.
SF: I see what you mean. That does not bother me at all, because it was true. Russia did not give a damn about Vietnam. They didn’t call it colonialism, but that’s what it was. That’s the hypocrisy of it. They are phonies, we are phonies, but we are honest phonies. We want the buck, they say they don’t want the buck. They want “kopeks,” but they won’t come out and say it. That makes me laugh!
RM: Of all your films, what is the one you most want your daughter to see?
SF: I don’t know. She’s seen several of my films. She saw The Big Red One. I was not with her. She’s five. And when she came back, she said, “Why did Daddy have a man shoot flowers?” And I said, “Well, he was not hurting the flowers. He was shooting past the flowers to kill someone.” She loves flowers. She loves insects. So I tried one more time. “Remember when you went to camp? This is a camp where they kill people. I want you always to remember this—that all the time while they’re killing people, the people who kill people are growing flowers. And they water them just like you do, and they’re beautiful.” But then I stopped because she couldn’t grasp it.
You see, in this scene there’s the death house and the ovens. And do you know what it was really like? I never saw this in the movies. The guards grew flowers. They had fun, and …
RM: In the concentration camp?
SF: Of course. Every time I see a concentration camp in films, it’s always bleak. It’s kind of gray, the big gates open. No, the camps we saw were relaxed. The guards lived there. You know how a prisoner will grow a garden? Well, a guard will grow a garden, too.
RM: Similarly, the pervert in The Naked Kiss loves beautiful things. A little child he molests brings him flowers. He loves Beethoven. In fact, it is frequently the case that those characters who share your preferences for high culture are perverts, are wrong in some psychological way. What’s behind that?
SF: Well, I’ll tell you, Grant [Michael Dante] was a symbol—in this case, of America, specifically the Midwest, [of respectability in] a nice little town like [your] Athens. A lie was in the air. It was created by people who were Grants—the character’s [family]. They belonged to organizations, a line of DARs or Kiwanis Club members. Whereas, the hooker [Constance Towers] is a symbol of someone who cannot even get into [their] neighborhood.
Now [about] the two hard-working people: his hard work may be in charity. Deciding if the needy people really are needy. Her job is laying. Of the two, I prefer her. [His being a] pervert is a symbol, too. Of course, all hypocrites do not go around molesting children. But for a motion picture to get an emotional impact with the damn people, I say hit it and hit it hard. I don’t go to a lectern with [Bishop] Fulton Sheen behind me and talk for five hours. I saw this as a very good story to show what happens when a person from one civilization goes into another.
PL: Are you saying that high culture—classical music, Beethoven—would be part of that kind of …?
SF: I put that in for one reason—that’s story writing. She now has a hook with the man, and [it’s] Beethoven. It doesn’t have to be that. It could be art. It could be a piece of furniture. She might come in and dream,—one day she would love to buy an authentic Queen Anne’s chair, and she walks into [his] house and there it is. It’s the thing that makes her mind explode. So she falls for him. Now he represents everything she has a hunger for, [and] she knows she has the intelligence to appreciate and accept these things.
Along comes this horrible curtain, her whole world (it’s not just artistic but a sensitive world) collapses. [However,] she found peace within the confines of her own mind, [and with] the privacy of her own appreciation of art and music. She found more respect, and above all—that’s my story—more honesty.
Now a lot of people don’t like the picture. People didn’t like the idea of [showing] what we call a nice middle-class community and exposing it. I’m not just exposing this community. I’m exposing the fact that we are unadulterated and highly dedicated bullshit artists.
PL: At the beginning of Shock Corridor, you quote Euripides. Beethoven comes in for Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. The characters in the films are not the kind who would be interested in such things. What does that mean to you?
SF: To me, it’s humorous. I like you very much for bringing out one little thing I enjoy. It doesn’t have to be [a Beethoven] museum. It could be anything. [In] Dead Pigeon, the American private eye could have been told] that a barge just sunk with forty-two thousand kids, or these are the spectacles that Beethoven wore, or the ear trumpet [Beethoven] wore. [All] he wants to know is, “What do I do now about the money?” In Dead Pigeon, the Beethoven house is important to me because I was in it one night during the War. I decided it would be wonderful to use it.
PL: Many characters in your films talk about how their parents taught them hatred and bigotry. Do you feel you were brought up to have narrow views?
SF: On the contrary. My mother was the most broad-minded woman I met. [Two ways she was narrow-minded:] she couldn’t believe homosexuals exist. She couldn’t believe that hookers have pimps who live off them. I said, “You must have known that when you were a girl.” And she said, “I didn’t … there can’t be anybody like that.”
RM: You never mention your father.
SF: Oh, he died when I was between ten and eleven. I didn’t know him well.
RM: Were you a good student?
SF: I was kicked out of high school.
RM: How did that happen?
SF: Well, the night editor of The New York Graphic said, “You are going to George Washington High School?” This was the biggest high school in New York, and the first coed one. He said, “There are some teachers there hanky-pankying around.” Which I didn’t know about. I didn’t care. “You’re going to that school. We’ll send a photographer.” Unbeknownst to me, the [news] desk didn’t like the Superintendent of the New York Board of Education. A personal thing. So they picked this idiot, that’s me. I was supposed to bring a [photographer] up to this recreation room, where the teachers got together to bullshit. He [hid] in a terrible position, behind the couch. What he wanted was a sex bullshit thing.
The photographer took pictures, and there was a flash. He scared them. But nothing was happening. A couple might have kissed, and they were telling dirty stories. There was no sex, actually. [But] I enjoyed it because I felt there was melodrama going on here. We were hiding, hiding, and this was evil, wrong, it was spying.
The paper came out. Page One. I was called to the auditorium. The principal was on stage and crucified me á la Judas Iscariot. He said, “If there is anything wrong going on at this school, you should have come to me. We’re only interested in cleanliness and godliness.” And he said, “Whatever you own, you take now. And anything owned by George Washington High School, any book, anything, you leave.” He made me very happy [expelling me], because that meant a day job [in] newspapers.
RM: Would you like to make a film about an artist?
SF: I have my story. Did my research. It’s called Balzac.
The tape stops here, but Samuel Fuller continues, caught up in his Balzac script. It’s a tribute to a lifelong idol whose novels he has read since adolescence. It’s also a reproach to the Académie Française, which has yet to admit Balzac to membership.